Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s . . . another superbug. The invasion of the multidrug-resistant superbugs is not a nightmare in the making. It’s already here. And it could be years before a new superhero lands in Metropolis to knock out the worst of the worst of these villains that are set on world domination. In a twist on the usual comic book tale, the super-resistant strains of CRE, malaria and tuberculosis threatening the world today are not the work of a mad scientist scheming away in a remote underground lab. They are...

What’s the difference between Congress and a Rube Goldberg contraption? They both use convoluted processes to accomplish a simple task, but the Goldberg invention still manages to keep the end result pretty simple. And while there may be some unintended consequences with both, they’re not unexpected with the absurd processes of a Goldberg machine. One look shows you what kind of mess you’re going to have if the cracker misses its mark, the parrot misses its perch, the seeds miss the bucket, the cigar lighter misses the fuse . . . Not so with Congress. By the time all 435...